Hard drive constanly thrashing

Model 652;
The HDD is constantly "thrashing" around. This has been going on for weeks now. I decided to do a power cycle which initially solved the problem, but only for a week. Now it's back to thrashing.
I have a 2nd 652, but that is not doing this.
This is setup for OTA & CATV w/ no CC if that matters. It also does not have any desktop functions (access) in use. It has a WD 1TB internal drive (WD10EVVS) with no external drive connected.

This is not a noisy or bad hard drive. The thrashing is quite, it either has to be dead quiet in the room or I have to place my ear next to the deck to hear this. It sounds as it's doing a defrag process continuously or indexing (if that is what it is called). I used MFSLive boot CD to image the drive.

Any ideas what is going on and why a power cycle temporally fixed the problem?

It's a brand new drive. It's a different drive than the other 652 which came with a installed 2 TB drive.
If it was going bad, why would a power cycle stop it for a week or so? It's the actuator arm that is constantly active.

To be clear, it isn't the noise level, the drive is quiet, it's the apparent constant activity. No, I haven't tested it yet, I just discovered the thrashing is back after a week of silence.

One thing I should add, just before the first power cycle a week ago, I noticed sluggish performance while navigating the menus and guide. It apparently froze when I tried entering the system info screen. The background animation continued, but it didn't accept any commands. I power cycled just after that which cleared the two problems.

Linux as an operating system is a combination of a kernel, user space utilities and customized packaging provided within the "distributions" such as Ubuntu, SuSE and Redhat.

The Linux kernel has had specific support for the alternate sector sizes and offsets used by WD Advanced Format disk drives since version 2.6.31. However, distributions based on Linux 2.6.34, the latest stable version of Linux, will provide the most thorough support. Advanced Format parameters are available in the sysfs file system from this kernel version onwards. Kernel versions older than 2.6.31 will not specifically detect Advanced Format Drives, but with proper alignment the system performance will be maintained. To ensure the best performance, it is important to:

Align partitions to the internal 4KB sector boundaries of the drive.
Make sure that data writes are aligned to 4KB sector boundaries.

Partitions are created by a number of possible utilities under Linux with "fdisk" and "parted" being typical command line tools. Parted is one of the better tools and from version 2.1 onwards it includes support for aligning Advanced Format drives. Fdisk and earlier versions of Parted won't automatically align partitions but can be used manually to set up the correct partition boundaries.

The Linux partition editor: parted, has an alignment option to ensure that Advanced Format drives are correctly configured from version 2.1:

-a alignment-type, --align alignment-type

valid alignment types are:

none Aligns to 512 byte sector boundaries.

cylinder Align partitions to cylinders.

minimal Use minimum alignment: 4KB on AF drives

optimal Use optimum alignment: 1MB boundaries

The default from parted 2.2 is to align to 1MB boundaries - optimal. Use minimal or optimal for Advanced Format drives. For example if your drive is sda:

It's a brand new drive. It's a different drive than the other 652 which came with a installed 2 TB drive.
If it was going bad, why would a power cycle stop it for a week or so? It's the actuator arm that is constantly active.

To be clear, it isn't the noise level, the drive is quiet, it's the apparent constant activity. No, I haven't tested it yet, I just discovered the thrashing is back after a week of silence.

I bought a used Humax DVD TiVo with a 1tig drive and it sounds like the arm is moving around most of the time. The TiVo also records shows in fine quality instead of basic and deletes shows even though there is a lot of room, so maybe I need to reload the software on it. I would have to learn how to do that though.
Maybe I will just put another hard drive from a working same model TiVo and make sure it works OK then.

I didn't mean to imply parted speaks Apple Partition Map, I don't know that. I was trying to suggest he examine the drive's partition map for mis-alignment as a potential cause for the drive's performance problems as detailed in the quoted article.

As the Western Digital article explains, a little further down,

Make sure that all partitions start on a multiple of 8 sectors (8x 512B = 4KB) and that partition sizes are multiples of 8 sectors. Make sure that there is space left at the start of partitions as required. For example on a boot drive, do not start at sector 0 as there needs to be space for the boot code. Sector 64 is a good start point or even 2048 which would be a 1MB boundary.

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Winmfs lets you look at the partition map of a TiVo drive and you can verify that the partitions are aligned properly.

For example, this is an actual TiVo drive (not advanced format) that, I believe, would be mis-aligned if it were an advanced format drive:

New drives go bad, happens all the time, drives can exhibit erratic behavior as they die.

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I understand. It's just a PITA to pull this out and diagnose it by a stab in the dark.

Try clearing out the "Recently Deleted" folder and keeping it clean.

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There aren't many recordings in there, the other deck has 3x as many (but a larger HDD).

your drive (WD10EZRX) appears to be an advanced format drive.

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Correct as most of the new drives are now. (new and improved?). I'm reasonable sure I defeated this since I was aware of the situation.

Is the "thrashing" youre talking about the seek noise a hard drive makes thats sounds like a crackling noise?

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Yes, but a very muted "crackling" if you will. It's the actuator arm swinging back and forth as it does during a defrag operation or with a fragmented drive as it is reading the fragments.

I have rechecked this sporadically and it isn't doing this 100% of the time. It does vary. It will settle down, then start uip again. Every time I also check the other deck (assuming it may be updates that are responsible. That one is quite.

Let me go back and retrace my steps when I imaged this from the original drive. I did use the MFSLive boot CD method, not WinMFS which I will now use in the future since I have read further and my concern of doing this within Windows was not valid.

I cleaned out the deleted folder, there were only 10 1 hour programs there. I deleted 6 more recordings that were duplicates from the other recorder, there are only five 1 hour programs that haven't been watch on the drive. BTW, I also have suggestions turned off if that matters.

Much of the above suggestions makes sense, but I'm trying to understand why a power cycle temporary fixed this. How about any of those kickstart functions before I pull this off the shelve and take a closer look at the drive?

I cleaned out the deleted folder, there were only 10 1 hour programs there. I deleted 6 more recordings that were duplicates from the other recorder, there are only five 1 hour programs that haven't been watch on the drive. BTW, I also have suggestions turned off if that matters.

Much of the above suggestions makes sense, but I'm trying to understand why a power cycle temporary fixed this. How about any of those kickstart functions before I pull this off the shelve and take a closer look at the drive?

Overall, it is no where near as bad as it was before the power cycle. I'll watch (listen) it closely the next day or so.
If this was a PC, that unresponsiveness that I reported when I was navigating through the menus seems to tell me the O/S and/or processor had some type of lockup.

Overall, it is no where near as bad as it was before the power cycle. I'll watch (listen) it closely the next day or so.
If this was a PC, that unresponsiveness that I reported when I was navigating through the menus seems to tell me the O/S and/or processor had some type of lockup.

Click to expand...

The only thing I have is a SWAG - The disk is/was full and fragmented. When it first starts up, the beginning of the live buffers are in contiguous (or close) sectors. As more is recorded, the sectors get further apart, thus the thrashing. With an empty "Recently Deleted", thus actual free space to deal with, a KS 58 might accomplish something. However, having never run one myself, I am not in a position to recommend it.

It being a Series 3, it's also possible that the power supply is causing problems. You might want to look at it and see if there are any bulging caps.

Personal experience: I have a THD whose hard drive started failing after 3 years and was replaced with a 1TB (fortunately, it didn't completely fail and I was able to use WinMFS to copy and expand). I try keep the "Recently Deleted" folder cleaned up as I have noticed that it gets sluggish and/or I get flakey recordings otherwise. Been running like that for almost 2 years with no real problems.